Wednesday, October 29, 2003
A very long post on Duncan vs. Wright
Having read J. Ligon Duncan’s article The Attractions of the New Perspective(s) on Paul I thought that it might be helpful to juxtapose a few quotes from Duncan and Wright. I hope to demonstrate by this that, at least Wright’s version of New Perspective theology, is badly misunderstood or misrepresented by Duncan. I think that I am warranted in focusing on Wright, because this is exactly what Duncan claims to do.
This is not intended to be anything resembling a full critique of Duncan’s article. There are too many faults in the article to draw attention to them all here. The uncharitable reading of Wright and the ungracious tone that comes to the surface on occasions does Duncan’s arguments no favours.
Is Justification a side-issue for Wright?
Duncan writes:—In a nutshell, the NPP suggests that the Judaism of Paul’s day was not a religion of self-righteousness that taught salvation by merit; that Paul’s argument with the Judaizers was not about works-righteousness (a works righteousness view of salvation over against the Christian view of salvation by grace); that Paul’s real concern was for the status of the Gentiles in the church; that justification is not so much about our relationship with God as it is about our relationship to our brothers and sisters in the church (and in particular, it’s about the status of the Gentiles in the church and the unity of Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians in the church); thus, that justification is more about ecclesiology than soteriology, more about who is part of the covenant community, and what are its boundary markers, than it is about how a person stands before God.Many people reading this passage would get the impression that proponents of the NPP see the doctrine of justification as a side issue, that Paul only used in order to deal with problems in the church. Wright holds nothing of the kind:—
Nor is it true—as anxious opponents of the “new perspective” are wont to say—that I am here simply reverting to the old either/or made famous by Wrede and Schweitzer, that Paul only talks about justification and the law in order to address a particular problem in the church. When we understand the place of Israel within his vision of God’s purposes for the world, the relation of Jew and Gentile can never be an incidental side-issue. [NIB Romans Commentary (Abingdon Press, 2002) pp.481-482 on Romans 3:28]I think that Duncan is the one who ends up emptying the doctrine of justification:—
One last observation before we move on. I think that one of the answers to the NPP is robust, biblical (and by that I mean to emphasize a high view of Scripture, a higher view than held by the advocates of the NPP) teaching about community and about the social implications of the Gospel, rather than to try and find a social dimension in justification. Because if you find it there, your are going to end up losing everything and gaining not much. [emphasis added]Am I reading this right? Is Duncan effectively denying that justification has a social dimension? He speaks of ‘the social implications of the Gospel’ as if social implications were not inherent in the gospel. Peter Leithart is right, ‘Transformation of life is not an implication of the gospel but inherent in the gospel, because the good news is about transformation of life.’
Does Wright deny the content of the Reformed doctrine of justification?
Duncan writes:—On the other hand, you can find him speaking of the doctrine that Luther called the article of a standing or falling church, and which Calvin identified as one of the two keys of the Reformation, as “a second order issue.” To boot, he throws in that “imputation” is a pious fiction, and that justification isn’t about soteriology, it’s about the eccesiology. Indeed, he comes close to claiming to be the only person who has ever understood Paul.It would help if Duncan had made clear that Wright does not deny the content of the Reformed doctrine of justification, but rather challenges the terminology in which it is generally framed, as these quotes make clear (I hope):—
Again:—Paul speaks in Romans, Galatians and Philippians of being ‘justified’ by faith; here, in verse 8, he speaks of being ‘saved’ by grace. ‘Justification’ and ‘salvation’ are not the same thing. ‘Justification’ has to do with people belonging to God’s family. It answers the question as to how they are marked out as members of it. ‘Salvation’ has to do with people being rescued from the fate they would otherwise have incurred. It answers the question as to how that rescue has taken place, and who is ultimately responsible for it. When Paul speaks of justification, the thing which marks people out is their faith. When he speaks, as here, of salvation, the responsibility is God’s, i.e. it comes about through ‘grace’.
He speaks of ‘salvation’ here, not ‘justification’, since the topic of the chapter at this point is not how God’s people in Christ are marked out, but how they are rescued from sin and death. At the same time, he glances at the other question: you have been saved, he says, by grace and through faith. Faith is not something that humans ‘do’ to make themselves acceptable to God. Nothing we can do, unaided, can achieve that. If there were such a thing, it would become a matter of our own initiative, and the people who had this ability would be able to hold their heads up in pride over those who didn’t. On the contrary. Because it’s all a matter of God’s gift, there is no room for any human being to boast. [Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters (SPCK, 2002) pp.22-23 on Ephesians 2:8]
…Paul’s point in the present passage is quite simply that what now marks out the covenant people of God, in the light of the revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus, is not the works of Torah that demarcate ethnic Israel, but “the law of faith,” the faith that, however paradoxically, is in fact the true fulfilling of Torah. There is no problem in adding the word “alone” to the word “faith”—a tradition that goes way back beyond Luther, at least to Aquinas—as long as we recognize what it means: not that a person is “converted” by faith alone without moral effort (that is true, but it is not the truth that Paul is stressing here), nor that God’s grace is always prior to human response (that is equally true, and equally not Paul’s emphasis here), but that the badge of membership in God’s people, the badge that enables all alike to stand on the same, flat ground at the foot of the cross, is faith. [NIB Romans Commentary p.482 on Romans 3:28]Duncan goes on to write:—
I would understand an quasi-Athanasian response from Wright to his orthodox critics — “of course you are upset, I’ve just said you've been dead wrong for five hundred or fifteen hundred years, on a doctrine that you think is the difference between heaven and hell, and you are wrong, but I don’t care, because I’m right, and it’s important for the church that we get Paul right.” That response, I can understand. But the reaction of “you chaps are making a storm in a teacup” is just downright thick.If Duncan has really read as much of Wright as he claims to, he would be aware that Wright’s criticism is directed primarily against the Reformation’s reading of Paul. Wright is not suggesting that we utterly reconstruct our understanding of soteriology, but that we place it firmly upon the foundations that the Pauline corpus presents us with. I have not found my soteriology undermined by reading Wright, only built upon. The man is a brilliant thinker, but I do not think that he has overturned anything the Reformed tradition has held concerning the essential elements involved in the salvation of the sinner. He has helped many of us to get the broader cosmic picture back into focus. However, this has merely served to expose glories of Reformed soteriology that we were only vaguely aware of. The truth of my salvation looks bigger and more Christ-centred today than it did before I had encountered N.T. Wright.
Wright, Discontinuity and Continuity
Duncan writes:—Indeed, two camps fall prey to it [the NPP]. First, there are evangelicals whose social consciences are captive to dominant secular moral concerns like racism, poverty, universal health care, social welfare, income redistribution and the like. They are attracted to how the NPP brings to bear the doctrine of justification as a resource to them in addressing those concerns. Little do they realize that by transposing justification from the soteriological to the ecclesiological, they actually lose all of its true social consequences. Second, there are evangelicals who are social conservatives but who are bent on Christianity expressing itself societally. Among these are theonomists, reconstructionists, “ex-theonomists and reconstructionists” and other miscreants. It is amazing how quick they are to discard reformational soteriological teaching in order to advance their neo-sacerdotalism, kingdom ecclesiology/eschatology, and dreams of Christendom. There is, by the way, a logical and theological connection between their desire to promote an eccentric continuitarian approach to hermeneutics (basically, they have a “flat” view of Old Covenant and New in the progress of redemption) and their attraction to certain aspects of the NPP (with its more rationalistic approach to New Testament exegesis that expects to find, via a “history of religions approach to the NT,” that there are few ideas in the NT without inter-testamental prescursors).Wright is no reconstructionist and is certainly not an advocate of ‘an eccentric continuitarian approach to hermeneutics’ as this quote should illustrate:—
Having said all that, we must also insist, against some current attempts to reinstate or rehabilitate Torah either within the church or (for instance within contemporary Israeli society) in wider social and political contexts, that the Torah is by itself weak. Not only can it not give the life to which it points; it accents, and indeed accentuates, the Adamic condition, the sinful and death-bound position, of those who embrace it. There is always a danger within the church that some Christians, anxious about Marcionism of whatever variety, and eager to insist that the whole Bible is the Word of God, will fail to heed the words of Jesus and Paul and will attempt to live by Torah in matters (for instance) such as the death penalty. There are some Christians today, despite the letter to the Hebrews and indeed the entire temple-based Christology and pnuematology of the New Testament, who seem to believe that the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem could still be God’s will; equally, there are some who, no doubt with considerable inconsistency (I do not hear them calling for a reappropriation of patriarchal marriage customs, for example), want to see the Jewish law as in some way(s) normative for Christians today. This is to make the mistake of treating revelation in a flat, dehistoricized fashion. As Paul’s own writings make abundantly clear, what we find in Scripture is above all a narrative: the great story of God and the world, and of God’s people as the people of God for that world. Torah stands as the headline over that story from the time of Moses to the time of the Messiah (Galatians 3 is the classic exposition of this); but the story, which started before the giving of Torah, moves on beyond the time when Torah was the determining factor, and Torah itself celebrates this fact. To say that its primary role was acted out in an earlier act in the drama than that in which Paul believed himself to be living is not to diminish its God-given role, but rather to celebrate it. To say that it goes on applying equally in the era of Christ and the Spirit is to ignore not only what Jesus and Paul said at several points but, if anything more important, the story Jesus enacted in his life, death and resurrection, the story Paul took as his starting point. [NIB Romans Commentary pp.586-587 reflections on Romans 8:1-11]One of the great appeals that Wright has for me personally is that his hermeneutic is not ‘an eccentric continuitarian approach’. In their response to dispensationalism, many Reformed thinkers have flattened out the Old and New Covenants. The language of ‘one covenant with two administrations’ lends itself to this, I believe. Coming from a Baptist upbringing, I was far more attuned to thinking in terms of discontinuity between key elements of the Old and New Testament. I swung the opposite direction for a while, in an overreaction, but I have found that Wright’s work holds the two elements together beautifully. For a while I was influenced by the approach of Robert Reymond’s systematic theology to the question of continuity. He effectively sets up an either/or of continuity or discontinuity. He argues that ‘Old Testament saints were saved through conscious faith in the future, anticipated sacrificial work of the promised Messiah in their behalf.’ This sort of approach ends up undermining the significance of development in redemptive history. Whilst the Messiah was certainly anticipated in the Old Testament, I believe that it is hard to argue that Old Testament saints generally believed that He was going to die on their behalf (in the sense that much of evangelicalism understands this) or rise again from the dead. The picture was just not that clear. Furthermore, this ends up downplaying the redemptive historical import of that which Christ accomplished on the cross. They were men and women of faith, but their faith did not possess the same objective doctrinal content as that of a NT believer. Reymond reads the NT back into the OT. Others, theonomists for example, can fall into the trap of reading the OT too much into the NT. I think that Wright successfully avoids both of these errors. Indeed, if we read Paul, as most evangelicals do, as describing two abstract ways of salvation, one by the merit of moral works and the other by faith in Jesus Christ we will end up missing the radical newness of the New Covenant. Wright relates continuity and discontinuity as follows:—
Regarding the newness of Christianity, Wright is clearly no follower of Sanders:—What matters for our present purposes is that, rare though Paul’s explicit references to the “covenant” may be, that word can appropriately reflect something absolutely foundational to his thinking: the faithfulness of God to all that had been revealed and promised in the past. This is not undercut by the fact that, because of sin and death, it was necessary for God to do something that seemed totally new in the present. Underneath the radical discontinuity caused by the gospel’s breaking in upon Israel and the world, caused indeed by the earth-shattering death of the Messiah, there remains the faithfulness of the creator and covenant God to the promises made to Abraham…
Pauline “covenant theology,” then, is not opposed to “apocalyptic” theology, to a sense of the radical inbreaking of God’s judgment and salvation in Christ. The covenant provides the fuller context for that…. [NIB Romans Commentary pp.560-561 on Romans 7:5-6]
E. P. Sanders’ teacher was W. D. Davis, who died recently. He saw all of this quite clearly. He once said to me, “If Christianity and Judaism are really just the same sort of thing, then what’s the fuss to be a Christian?” He clearly saw that there was something utterly distinctive about Christianity, while honoring its Jewish roots. There are many of us who see the force of Sanders’ basic point about not leveling against first-century Judaism criticisms appropriate to sixteenth-century Catholicism, but who would agree with his teacher that this doesn’t reduce the uniqueness of Christianity. I think my published writings make my own position very clear on that.Duncan treats Wright as if he believed that covenantal nomism was the NT pattern of salvation (a very common mistake).
Wright and Sin
Duncan writes:—Sixth, the new perspective offers a diminished view of sin and the issue of sin in the New Testament. I think that that kind of mood in the NPP needs to be looked at very closely. Now, N.T. Wright himself (and you have heard it in one of the quotes that I gave earlier) will go out of his way to say we shouldn't set covenant membership over against forgiveness of sins. But the minute you say that justification is not about your relationship with God, it is about relationships in the covenant community, you have already diminished sin. Unavoidably and necessarily, you have diminished the issue of sin, and justification as the means of relief of the condemnation of sins. I think that is an issue we need to consider.Wright writes:—
Writing after a century in which many Western Christians have regarded it a something of a social or even liturgical faux pas to speak of sin, let alone Sin, it is important to stress that our soft-pedaling of the New Testament’s analysis of the depths of the human problem has done no service to either the church or the world…. It is time once again to hold out the analysis of human behavior offered in the New Testament. There is such a thing as Sin, which is more than the sum total of human wrongdoing. It is powerful, and this power infects even those with the best intentions. If it could make even the holy Torah its base of operations, how much more the muddled intentions of well-meaning do-gooders. [NIB Romans Commentary p.588 reflections on Romans 8:1-11]
Wright and Legalism
Duncan writes:—Basically, Sanders and Wright and other proponents of the NPP say that “unless you can show me the crassest, most blatant examples of merit theology, then the Rabbinic Judaism of the day is alleviated of the charge of merit theology.” But semi-Pelagianism, and we know this pastorally, is subtle and as elusive as an eel. The person who is trying to combine grace and works in salvation is the hardest to get to and the one most easily self-deceived.Duncan has already quoted a passage from Paul Zahl to the effect that Judaism does not go far enough in its analysis of the human problem. He implies by this that Wright and other NPP advocates fail to recognize any aspect in which this is true. However, Wright and others are quite willing to grant that the OT system of religion was insufficient:—
What the Torah, the covenant document, could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh—human flesh, Jewish flesh—with which it had to work, God has done, thus declaring himself to be in the right in terms of his covenant. He has sent his Son to die, and given his Spirit to bring life, so that the righteous covenant decrees of the law … might be fulfilled in the creation, and eventual salvation, of a new covenant community… [The Climax of the Covenant (T&T Clark, 1991) p.216]Wright maintains that Paul would oppose all who would hold the Torah to be the solution to Israel’s problem. The solution to Israel’s problem was not the Torah and covenantal nomism, but the eschatological righteousness of God. Duncan has failed to take account of these central aspects in Wright’s understanding by levelling this criticism. The whole semi-Pelagian business serves to cloud the issue. Wright questions whether Sanders’ distinction between ‘getting in’ and/or ‘staying in’ is helpful in our understanding of covenantal nomism [see What St. Paul Really Said (Lion, 1997) p.32]. Duncan seems to miss the thrust of Wright’s position. Membership in the covenant is demonstrated by keeping the law, not earned [see The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress Press, 1992) p.334]. Wright argues that the traditions and case laws of the Pharisees and others were a means by which they sought to preserve the symbol of the Torah by turning it into praxis [see The New Testament and the People of God p.229-230]. Wright also argues that Jesus challenged the ‘Pharisees’ right to make their own interpretations of Torah the litmus test of such loyalty [to the symbols of Israel’s identity]’ [see Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress Press, 1996) p.396.]. Wright acknowledges that a form of ‘legalism’ could develop in such a manner:—
My teacher George Caird said when I read the mishnah that is what I mean by legalism. You know people are often not satisfied with one definition. They will say, "Is it a this or is it a that?" And when you have given them that, they then say, "But what happens on the Sabbath?" This results in more and more and more endless definitions that have to be learned and applied. That produces a rulebook mentality. Even if you say the whole thing comes under the rubric of grace, by the time you get nineteen stages down the development of the casuistry you just have to wonder how much of this really is grace.I am trying to think of a good analogy to describe the way in which the Torah functions for Wright. I suppose that it could be compared to the situation that exists within a family. The family talks together, eats together and lives together. The family has distinctive ways of doing certain things. All of these things serve to demonstrate that which the family is. I don’t eat with my family in order to ‘get in’ or even to ‘stay in’ — I eat with them because I am ‘in’. The fact that I do these things marks me out as one who is ‘in’, but does not establish me as such. Just as legalism can creep into a family when members of the family act as if things have to be done ‘just so’ in order to identify yourself as a true member and members who do not act in such a manner are alienated, the same thing happened (to a degree) with the Pharisees. However, this is not quite the sort of legalism that Duncan is thinking about. The key problem that many evangelicals have is that they cannot give any clear account of how God intended Torah to function. If Paul was merely attacking a perversion of the Torah on the part of his opponents, his gospel is suddenly disconnected from history and we are left wondering what role exactly the Torah is to play after Christ. The redemptive historical significance of the gospel is downplayed and the Gospel’s relation to the Torah (in its proper use) becomes very hard to ascertain. If Paul was attacking the use of the Torah period, we are left wondering why God gave it in the first place. Wright’s explanation provides a compelling solution that avoids both of these problems.
Wright on the meaning of Justification
Duncan quotes Chuck Hill, who writes:—Hill’s ‘challenge’ is ridiculous to anyone who has read Wright in any depth.Challenge: find a lexicon which defines the Greek word dikaiosune (“righteousness”) as “membership within a group” or dikaioo (“justify”) as “to make or declare the member of a group.” [It’s not even down under definition number 14d!]
Another way is to look at previous and contemporary works, etc., to try to establish current usage. The claim to have discovered and restored this broad Jewish context is central to Wright’s attempt to redefine justification. He essentially argues that in the Judaism which nurtured Paul and which Paul addressed throughout his ministry, justification is all about covenant membership in God’s Israel. Here I think he is radically wrong. He has certainly not established this in his book. The covenant relationship may be the context in which Jews discussed justification, but it was the context for their discussion of everything!
Wright and his use of Contextual Concerns
Duncan quotes Hill again:—The fourth and final exegetical error I want to point out is the way the NPP allows a provisional theory regarding the interpretation of the Judaism prior to and contemporary with early Christianity utterly to dominate its exegesis. The text takes a backseat to context, however tenuous the assertions of context are.Wright’s conclusions, however, were first derived from the text:—
As I have argued elsewhere, it is the Lutheran interpretation that leans too much on the supposed context.The way that I came into this is a bit interesting. I grew up as a somewhat typical middle-Anglican with a strong dash of evangelicalism, or put the other way around, I grew up in a Lutheran evangelicalism which left me with a strong antithesis between law and grace. I found this all profoundly unsatisfying until I met Calvin and Calvinism. I began to think, "Whew...the law is a good thing. It is holy and just and good. It is right and it has been fulfilled, not abrogated, in Christ." All of that is right. So, if you are faced with a choice between Luther and Calvin, you simply have to choose Calvin. I think a lot of evangelical debates in North America, at the moment, are still right around that axis although they don't come right out and actually say so. What I then found, and believe me I tried very hard to do this, was that I couldn't make the Calvinist reading of Galatians actually work. I was reading C.E.B. Cranfield on Romans and trying to see how it would work with Galatians, and it simply doesn't work. Interestingly, Cranfield hasn't done a commentary on Galatians. It's very difficult. But I found then, and this was the mid-seventies before E.P. Sanders was published, before there was such a thing as a "new perspective," that I came out with this reading of Romans 10:3 which is really the fulcrum for me around which everything else moved: "Being ignorant of the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own."
In other words, what we have here is a covenant status which is for Jews and Jews only. I have a vivid memory of going home that night, sitting up in bed, reading Galatians through in Greek and thinking, "It works. It really works. This whole thing is going to fly." And then all sorts of things just followed on from that. I mean Sanders was a great boost but he didn't start this for me and he hasn't given direction to what I did or was doing. It was more like Sanders was saying, "Actually first-century Judaism never was like what Luther said it was."
Conclusion
I could write much, much more. This post, however, is far too long as it is. Duncan’s critique is very poor. He seems to have a desire to polarize the Reformed and New Perspective readings of Paul. I believe that they need not ultimately be in conflict. Duncan wants to maintain that God deals with us in ‘strict justice’. This leads him to believe that the NPP baptizes ‘semi-Pelagianism as orthodox’. People often have a lot of problems reconciling systems of ‘strict justice’ with the idea of a covenantal salvation. Duncan could have been far more gracious and charitable in his critique. A more tempered and nuanced critique would have been of far more benefit to the church. The NPP certainly has a number of areas in which it must improve. I would like to see a more nuanced view of Second Temple Judaism and greater attention given to historical theology. I believe that Duncan is right to criticize the NPP’s weaknesses in this area. However, I also believe that the basic thesis is correct and will only be strengthened as we turn our attention to these areas of present weakness.